Nose out

> Bunny suit ... An Intel Custom Foundry worker in the fab

Is the intel worker complying with the clean room procedure? he has his nose out. When I worked in a clean room (before our UK fab was shut) that was a no-no, though certain individuals did it anyway of course.

laptops for kids

I bought a couple of fat old Dell Precision M4300s for my girls on Ebay ("mobile workstations").

OK so they're anything but light but they withstand a fair bit of abuse, and have high-res screens especially useful for young people with enviable near-field eyesight. Oh no no Windows 8? Well Ubuntu will have to do for them.

Re: Not my GMail password

since the password file is out there couldn't Google download it, check the passwords' validity, and email / SMS anyone whose actual password has been leaked?

Am I wrong in thinking there should be no risk with that, other than the Google staffer searching for the relevant torrent being exposed to some "23 hot women near you want to date you tonight"-style links? (*blush* )

RE: Nope, it's the job of us cyclists to do that.

When I read the bit about waiting an extra second after the light turn read I thought about how I (cyclist) feel just about the most dangerous time to cross a traffic junction is when the lights just go green: you run the risk of being hit by people crossing the opposite green phase when it's already turning red (aka cherry-green), and you're in the scrum of everybody else and annoying law-abiding car drivers. I often cross in the middle of the red phase, in case it's absolutely obvious that the junction is clear. Yes it pisses off some horn-happy drivers, but more reasonable ones appreciate the fact that I'm not in their way in the junction when they're using it.

The second thing that came to mind is that I found on a recent trip in Taiwan that their red and green phases are often about 90 seconds long. That requires patience but increases throughput. They also have big displays showing a countdown of the remaining "red" seconds.

phablet

just been to china... people there appear to love their phablets. Lots of people aren't actually that big and neither are their hands, but a Galaxy Note or some other huge phone is what people (affluent ones who can afford to fly to Taiwan) use.

Re: Lizard People?

What is funny? It's not to do with the seriousness of the subject matter, for me. I'm open to laughing about all sorts of serious or even tragic things if there is an ironic twist.

Where the funniness of the lizard thing is lost is that it's based on a misunderstanding on the technical point: You don't revoke the fingerprint!

Make a comical point about some crap policy like the bedroom tax: bring it on.

If you're driven into rent arrears and debt because you can't afford your council house any more and there is no smaller one to move into, you may be upset about it, but it doesn't take the "funny" away.

Re: Attention Handset Manufacturers!

Re: units again...

What with it being Friday and this being The Register.. we should attempt to convert this into the universal system of Vulture Central Standards.

I cannot find a unit of mass in the standard-defining document (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards), so I propose the Vulture Standard grapefruit which already defines volume to be the new mass unit as well, according to yahoo answers it weighs 0.128kg in SI.

That makes the natural choice for a unit of force the weight of a grapefruit on Mars, and the energy unit (Mars-grapefruit * double-decker-bus) or Mgddb for short.

In summary, the energy stored in this phone's battery is just shy of 7000Mgddb (assuming this phone battery has 3.7V like mine)

P.S. I know the standard length unit should be linguine but it sounds much more fun to ship a bus to Mars and stand it on end for the necessary experiments!

Real-time buying behaviour

The store manager gets real-time buying figures on his tablet from the tills.

The "aisle linger time" metric (presumed to be predictive of some sort of latent shopping intent) is limited to a certain class of customers only, namely the one who buys EE phone contracts and top-spec smartphones. But maybe that's good because that's means it's the segment that's open to having other useless crap flogged to them as well.

security education

Ecommerce sites could do even more for security:

When someone creates an account on their site it should do some automated login attempts with the same password (Twitter, facebook, ...) and, if successful, automate a post to the dimwit's social network saying "I'm a security dimwit and my password is <qwerty>".

$$$ Millions for Europa

Just as well it's the US: here in UK it would cause Nigel Farrage to hyperventilate and several of Farrage-wannabes in the Tory backbenches to have a heart attack before they found out they've read the headline wrong.

Lolita

My dad claims his colleague (he worked as a grammar school teacher) read "Lolita" covered in a "Bible" dust jacket back in the 60s when travelling to school on the tram, but I'm fairly sure it was him really.

Zoom?

the full-zoom shot of the Hilton tower (hence the Paris angle -> ) shows that 20MP is a simple waste of storage, it's useless at that size. A _good_ 8MP camera is enough for a phone, all the Lumia 41MP trickery nonwithstanding (there it's mostly a basis for noise-reducing oversampling)

"most-viewed pixels"

Maybe most-rendered pixels. But at some low-level hardware layer in my visual cortex there is content filter that removes that information from the input stream. I suspect I'm not the only one with that function.

Maybe they're trying to circumvent that filter with their redesign, but the hardware architecture has been honed for millions of years to adapt to new challenges quickly.

Linux fans should applaud Billy G

Microsoft DOS and later windows paved the way for cheap commodity computer hardware, which made Linux possible. Even Windows-haters (me included) know that we have Bill to thank for that, not just for GORILLAS.BAS